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> Spend your money on riotous living

The letter is BS with the first line. It makes it sound like the options are giving money to your kids or getting drunk. But that makes no sense for the range of money we’re talking about.

Jeff Bezos could throw a $10 million party every night for a year and his net worth would go down 2%.

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Thats not how networth works. No one has enough liquid capital to spend money like that. As soon as people found out Bezos was wasteful like that, his network would drop just based on stock price.

Maybe? That doesn’t counter my point. If anything it only enhances it. Estate taxes do not contribute to “riotous living” because cash on hand is not at all a limiting factor on how much they party. There are more important things, like the perception and how that affects them (like you pointed out).

“If I leave this hundred billion dollars to my kids, the government will take a portion. Better to spend it on hookers and blow instead!”

That makes about zero sense, so I don’t at all believe that’s the message the estate tax is sending or it would even matter if it was. The thing that keeps billionaires from partying isn’t the price tag.

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